The People In The Woods

by Robert Brown

  He climbed the steps to the anthropology building and entered the cool, dim front hall, all wood and tile. A collection of faculty photos hung on one wall beside photos of the graduate students—fewer of those with every semester. The department had been coasting in its reputation for years now, and word was beginning to spread. Nick wasn’t alone in not publishing anymore. Students, like all young people, wanted to be where something was happening, and not much happened in the anthropology department of Republic University.

  After standing in the hallway for a minute to cool down, Nick climbed the creaky wooden steps to the upper floor. Passing the open door of an office, he saw Phil Bennett, one of the archaeology professors who specialized in the local prehistoric Native Americans. The man was neatly dressed in a jacket and tie, his slicked-back gray hair perfectly combed even though it was the weekend. Bennett sat at his computer. The rapidity with which he minimized one of the windows hinted at what he had been looking at. Nick had caught him before.

  “Have a good jog?” Professor Bennett asked.

  “Exhilarating. Anyone else here?”

  “Nope.” Bennett looked back at his screen, obviously waiting for Nick to leave.

  “Well, see you.”

  “Bye.”

  Nick went to his office and closed the door, confused as to why he hadn’t shared what he’d seen. Was it because he didn’t want to have a conversation with a colleague sporting an erection? That was certainly part of it. But, really, he wanted to keep what he had seen to himself, at least for the moment. It had confused and disturbed him in some deep way, more than it should have. He wanted to think it through.

  Nick took off his shirt and rubbed himself down with a towel he kept in his office. After putting on a clean shirt and more deodorant, he opened the blinds and sat at his desk. He had a fine view of the quad, partially screened by an oak tree growing just outside his window. For a minute, he sat there admiring a couple of lovely young coeds walking down the path underneath his window. Bennett should look more outside his window and less at his screen. He’d get brought before the Chancellor for misuse of university equipment if he wasn’t careful.

  So, what had been going on back there at the abandoned railway station? It seemed like more than just some wannabe Satanist kids messing around. It had the air of folk magic to it. There was a planning to the layout of those stick figures, one he’d have to study to better understand. The figures had taken a bit of talent to create as well. Simple and yet so expressive. Familiar, too. Nick flipped through some of the books on the large bookshelf by his desk but found no close parallels.

  After a while, he gave up. His eye passed over the stack of ungraded exams and he turned away in disgust. Grading was the least rewarding part of a generally unrewarding job. At least they wouldn’t be copied from websites like so many of the term papers. Students didn’t seem to understand that if they could find something on the Internet, so could he. In fact, the university had given all the professors a computer program that did the checking for them, giving the percentage of the paper lifted from online sources, with links to each one. It was like an automatic failing machine. But the righteous sense of satisfaction Nick had gotten from failing plagiarizers had worn off years ago. Now it just made him depressed.

  He checked his phone, which he had left behind during his run, and saw a call from his wife, Cheryl. He called her back.

  “Hey, how was your run?”

  “Good. Did nine miles today.”

  “That’s great!”

  “I’m going to get rid of this beer belly pretty soon.”

  “To do that, you’ll have to get rid of the beer.”

  “Yeah, yeah. How was your morning?”

  “Busy writing out this grant proposal. Why does each one have to have different formatting? It drives me crazy. I can’t just use elements from similar proposals. I have to type out everything all over again, even my CV!”

  Cheryl was a microbiologist at Republic University. Unlike Nick, she hadn’t given up on advancing her career and was giving herself ulcers and a serious sleep disorder trying to juggle teaching and a full research load. Her success compared to his own made him uncomfortable. Her constant stress made him worry.

  “Try not to work all weekend,” Nick said. “Want to go to the river for a walk?”

  Cheryl sighed. “No time. I’m going to have to work tomorrow, too. We can watch some Netflix tonight. What are you going to do for the rest of the day?”

  Not spend it with you, apparently, Nick thought. Out loud he said, “I guess I’m going to grade some exams. Go to lunch in town—”

  “Order a salad.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Then I have to look up some things in the library. I’ll see you for dinner. I’m cooking.”

  “Thank you,” she said with obvious relief. “Sorry I’m so stressed but I have to get this done before Monday. The team will need to review my part and give me input before the Wednesday deadline.”

  “All right. Love you.”

  “Love you, bye.”

  Their final words were given quickly, almost formally. Nick remembered a time when those words had meaning behind them. He supposed they still did. It would be nice to feel it a bit more, though.

  Nick sat back and gazed out the window in silence, not really seeing the trees or the coeds or the Victorian buildings. Instead, he was deep in thought.

  Why hadn’t he mentioned what he had seen to Cheryl? He hadn’t mentioned it to Bennett, either. Did he really want to keep it from everybody?

  He didn’t know but he did know one thing.

  He was going back there tomorrow morning.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The trail seemed less foreboding this time. Birds sang in the trees and the rustle of branches high above told Nick that the squirrels were active once again. The low hum of cicadas created a white noise background to the peaceful woodland sounds.

  Nick felt relieved but not surprised. Whoever had been lurking in the bushes the previous morning wouldn’t still be there. The guy had probably been some jogger anyway, someone who had stumbled upon the stick figures and the gutted squirrel like he had, then heard Nick and gotten scared. From what he’d read, animals could sense fear in larger animals, and they responded in kind. The birds and squirrels had mistaken the two large humans as predator and prey and had gone silent, waiting for the deadly game to pass by them.

  Still, Nick kept a close eye on the surrounding woods as he walked down the tracks. He had parked in the housing development off the highway and walked along the little-used path half a mile to reach the far end of the converted railway trail, just where it stopped and the rails had been left in place.

  Nick hadn’t felt like jogging all the way. He was still sore from his epic run the day before and, besides, he had brought a camera. He wanted to get some good shots of the figures and the squirrel. Unlike what everyone under twenty-five thought, a smart phone wasn’t a good enough camera. If you wanted publication-quality photographs, you had to use a real camera—in his case, a Pentax with a powerful zoom lens.

  Nick had decided to do some research on these figures. Yesterday’s trip to the library had turned up nothing, so he was going to take some photographs and talk with local folklorists. He might even make a paper out of it. It would be nice to publish something for a change.

  But then he saw something that puzzled him. More accurately, he saw nothing.

  He was sure he should have come to the first of the figures by now, the one that looked a bit like a wolf.

  But perhaps he had misjudged the distance the previous day. He continued.

  Still he didn’t see any of the figures hanging from the trees. Now he could see the old, overgrown station up ahead.

  Nick stopped and looked around, puzzled. What was going on? There had been at least a dozen hanging right where he stood.

  A prickle of fear ran up his spine. He dismissed the emotion as cowardly. So, his hidden companion from the previous day had
taken them. Why?

  Nick continued to the station, treading softly. He clutched his camera in front of him like a shield.

  The station was silent and dark. No flies buzzed at the doorway. Instead of the overpowering stench of the previous day, Nick caught only a faint whiff of carrion. Biting his lower lip, he peeked inside and to the left.

  The squirrel was gone.

  Instead, jammed into the wall just next to the door, was a large knife.

  Nick jumped.

  He glanced around the interior of the station, then over his shoulder. No one.

  But he didn’t need anyone to tell him what the knife meant. The meaning was clear enough.

  Mind your own business.

  He stepped inside the station, half out of curiosity and half to get out of sight. As he had noticed on his last visit, the interior was one room, with no hidden spots that he needed to worry about. It was more of a shelter from the elements than an actual station. There wasn’t even a ticket office. He supposed people paid the conductor in those days.

  Slinging his camera, he pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight mode. Its beam lit up the area where the squirrel had hung. A few dark, dry spots on the floor probably contained its blood. A fresh nail stuck in an old roof beam showed where the squirrel had been strung up.

  Nick glanced out the door again and scanned the forest. All looked and sounded normal. He pulled the knife—a large but otherwise normal kitchen knife—out of the wall. Gripping it made him feel better. Then he realized that he had just obscured any fingerprints.

  Did that matter? It wasn’t like this person had committed any crimes. Mutilating a squirrel wasn’t going to get you locked up in jail. Well, maybe in this hick state. They’d probably charge you for wasting lunch meat.

  He moved around the station, testing each step with his foot before putting his full weight on it. The floorboards groaned in protest but didn’t buckle.

  The search produced nothing, just some old graffiti. The interior had obviously been swept. There was no trash—just a few stray leaves that had blown in. The back door was warped shut, so Nick left the way he had come.

  At a loss, he paused at the concrete platform. Near his feet he saw a stamp in the concrete: “WPA 1938.” A Depression-era project from the Works Progress Administration.

  What had this station been for? It seemed like it was in the middle of nowhere.

  Then he noticed that all the trees in this area were young, with thin trunks. None looked older than half a century, not that he was an expert.

  He descended the concrete steps and circled the station. Behind it, he saw a cracked and overgrown macadam lot and the faint trace of an old road leading off through the woods. Here and there in the thick underbrush, he saw low mounds. Curious, he approached one of them.

  The foundations of a building, as was the mound beyond it. He wandered for a time. A settlement had been there—a poor one, judging from the modest size and shoddy construction of the houses. None of them had withstood the test of time. Ironic. The only building still standing was the station that had been intended to serve this village. Nick had read a lot of history to supplement his anthropological studies; he knew that until the widespread use of cars in the 1930s and the later spread of the interstate highway system, railroads had crisscrossed the nation, serving even small communities. It had been a different era. Nick had never been on a railway journey within the United States but the people who lived in this village must have celebrated in 1938 when they got a brand-new station. It was their link to the outside world. He supposed the track had run along his jogging path to some station in Republic that was long gone, linking this village to the “big city.” The locals would no longer have had to walk in.

  That was all very interesting, but it didn’t get him any closer to determining what had happened to those stick figures. Nick returned to the tracks and started following them farther into the woods. He put his phone back in his pocket but continued to grip the knife. It made him feel better.

  He didn’t have to go far.

  About a quarter mile beyond the station, he saw the first one.

  It was a canine again, this time better made than the one he had seen before. Unmistakably, it was a wolf. It rocked back and forth in the breeze, suspended by a length of twine from a low branch next to the tracks.

  Nick shuddered and looked around. The coast was clear. He set down the knife with some reluctance, then pulled out his camera and took a photo.

  He felt much better once the knife was in his hand again.

  After another minute of walking, Nick spotted more stick sculptures hanging from the boughs of a large oak tree. Unlike the other trees in this area, this one looked old, with a thick trunk and gnarled limbs. Seven sculptures hung in a circle from the limbs facing the old railroad track. They were another wolf or dog, a Devil’s face, a pentagram, and four human figures. Even from a distance, he could see and hear the cloud of flies buzzing around the spot.

  Heart pounding, he approached. Something was lying on the forest floor beneath the ring of stick sculptures.

  Something bloody and torn.

  A cat.

  It had been a large tabby. It lay on its back. Like the squirrel, it had been gutted and the flies fed on its entrails. Each of its paws was missing.

  Bile rose in Nick’s throat and he turned away.

  After a moment, he forced himself to take pictures of everything—the general layout, close-ups of each stick figure, and a close-up of the cat.

  Once he was done, he took a quick glance around. There was no sign of any more sculptures, just a few mounds of old wooden shacks returning to the earth.

  Time to leave. He didn’t want to be around when whoever had done this returned. He jogged down the tracks, eyes alert, knife at the ready.

  It wasn’t long before he reached the end of the expanded trail and the shortcut leading to the housing development. No one was around. Nick hurried down the path almost to its end before he discarded the knife. Even then, he didn’t feel safe doing so but walking through that parking lot with a big knife in his hand might prompt one of the local yokels to blow his head off with a shotgun.

  With a profound sense of relief, Nick got into his old Ford and pulled out of the parking lot. Instead of taking the highway past town to his neighborhood, he took the access road. He wanted to drive slowly and take some time to think.

  What had he stumbled upon? The mutilation of the squirrel had been disturbing enough, but whoever did that had moved on to kill a cat. Psychologically, that was a big step. A squirrel was a wild animal and considered a pest. A cat was a domestic animal. There were cultural and even legal barriers to torturing and killing one.

  A more disturbing thought ran through him like a rush of ice water. Serial killers often mutilated animals before escalating to humans.

  Nick shook his head. He was being overly dramatic. Statistics showed that those disturbed individuals who mutilated animals almost never went on to become murderers.

  But what about that knife stuck in the wall?

  What was going on with those figures suspended from the branches? The horned head was obviously the Devil, an unimaginative representation of evil by some uneducated person. The same with the pentagram. The humans could mean just about anything—worshippers, gods, spirits, victims. The canines were almost certainly wolves, as that would appeal to the wild, rural feel of it all.

  So, some sicko playing at being a Satanist.

  Nick felt a bit disappointed. He thought he had come across some hidden folk culture.

  Instead, he had come across a crime.

  He turned off the access road into town and headed for the police station.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Chewing on the end of his moustache, Sheriff Luke O’Connor looked at the photos on the screen on the back of Nick’s camera. Sheriff O’Connor was a heavy, deliberate man in his fifties—someone who looked like he had seen it all. When he got to the picture
of the cat, his eyes narrowed a little but that was his only reaction.

  They sat in his office in Republic’s large police station. The walls were decorated with photos of O’Connor’s family, several pictures of him on bass fishing trips, and a commendation from the Drug Enforcement Agency.

  “So, you say that you found a squirrel yesterday cut up in the same way?” Sheriff O’Connor asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And it was gone when you went back just now?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sure you didn’t notice any details about the individual who was hiding in the brush yesterday?”

  “Bulky, average height. I think it was a man.”

  “Anything else you can remember about the individual?”

  “No, sorry.”

  Sheriff O’Connor handed back the camera. “Pretty sick stuff. Can you send me those photos?”

  “Sure.”

  Nick pulled out the memory card and stuck it into a USB adaptor that he kept in his camera bag.

  “Any idea who could have done this?” asked the professor as he handed over the device.

  The policeman shrugged as he plugged the USB into his old desktop. “Teenagers, probably. Sometimes we get complaints about Devil music coming from the woods at night.”

  “Devil music?”

  “You know, Metallica and Slayer and all that junk.”

  “Oh.”

  Nick was amused the officer couldn’t name a band from later than the Nineties, until he realized that neither could he.

  “Have you ever seen something like this before?” Nick asked as the photos uploaded.

  “Oh, sure. Drawings of the Devil or 666, that sort of thing. Kids want to rebel against the good Christian teachings they get at home.”

  Nick nodded. Republic was the only college town he had ever seen that had more churches than bars. In fact, the local ordinance prohibited liquor sales on Sunday and several of the state’s counties were dry.